It has been a very entertaining and busy two weeks. In screencasts “DHH”:http://www.rubyonrails.org/screencasts shows us how easy it is to create a web log using the rails framework. In fact, it only takes 15 minutes.

If only.

Building my blog took a little bit longer than 15 minutes. Of course my needs are hard to fill and I knew very little about rails before I started. I wanted a lot: Security, Textile, Tags, Spam protection and a clean migration from my “previous blog engine”:http://www.subtextproject.com/.

Migrating a win2k machine to Linux is an interesting and challenging experience. As of now, I have no access to my server cause I firewalled myself off the box using Shorewall.

I guess I should come clean and give some shout-outs to all the software that made this blog happen. (Excluding the obvious Ruby and Rails)

h3. Development tools

“Aptana”:http://www.aptana.com/ : I used Aptana to write this site, it is a very nice IDE based of eclipse with excellent ruby and rails support.

“Redcloth”:http://whytheluckystiff.net/ruby/redcloth/ : The default library for textile support. Somehow most of my previous posts ended up having very complicated html. I am determined not to have this happen again. In fact - my source of truth for all my posts is in textile.